Have You Ever Burnt Out Your Inner Transformer?

Crossed wires shorting out, Troy, Illinois. After a few minutes of sporadic arcing, the transformer down the street burned out. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every so often the universe seems to send me a message that at first seems inexplicable.

This morning the electricity to my house went off with a loud popping sound, like something had exploded, at around 7am. Unlike the photo to the right, there was no bad weather to account for it.

When I called the power company, they said there were no other power outages reported, and that I should check the status in a half hour. I was nervous about this whole thing and called a friend who said it sounds like your transformer blew.

As soon as he said the word transformer, I thought the universe is trying to tell me something about my inner transformer!

Over Extending Our Inner Transformers

There are many ways to blow out our inner transformers. My ways include:

Overly aggressive plans

Unfair comparison to others

Working too many hours on the wrong projects

Disrespecting my body

Changing focus too often

You may have other ways.

A week ago, I was in aggressive mode. I set up a clever and disciplined plan for moving into the next phase of my life. I thought it was simple and brilliant. Then, I tried to implement it. It didn’t look too aggressive, but it was. The plan called for massive change in several areas in my life simultaneously. And after trying it for a week, I had found a way to not spend one minute working on my novel (again).

I’m not sure what my next big dream is, but I’ve told myself that my big dream for the next decade of my life is to work on novels, and yet I haven’t finished the first one. I have been asking myself, is finishing a novel my dream? Maybe it’s not. I suspect novel writing isn’t my total big dream, but it is an important part of it.

dramatic dream (Photo credit: unNickrMe)

So yesterday, I decided to do what life coach Jen Louden recommends:

When you get stuck in life –lower your threshold of success, and take the minimum amount of action you take to move forward.

For the first time in two months, I started working on my novel again by giving myself permission to only work on it for an hour per day. It felt great to work on it again!

The surprising or maybe not so surprising thing was almost immediately after starting down this simpler path, my fears of failure blew that little success out of the water. All I could think of was every reason why I couldn’t transform any of my dreams into a reality. I went to sleep feeling disillusioned, even though in many ways my life is good now and getting better.

Fortunately, I woke up remembering whenever we are moving into a new version of ourselves, fear is going to try to keep us the same. As I was thinking about fear, the power went off.

After I did everything I could to address the power outage, I decided to look for the message in this little life incident because it felt more important than it would seem.

Transformer (Photo credit: Museum of Hartlepool)

Here are my thoughts about our inner transformer:

It’s helpful to realize that we have an inner transformer. It might be even helpful to give it a name and work with it archetypally.

Our inner transformer has limits of what it can do.

Our fear can shut off our inner transformer in an instant, if we don’t work with fear properly.

The vision that our inner transformer is working with has to be stronger than our fears as many wise teachers tell us.

Working with our powerful vision is easier said than done.

Often, we have to experiment to find the right pace of change for our inner transformer.

Even an easy small change can bring up our fear of changing our status quo, because something in us knows that small but consistent daily changes our internal power structure.

As soon as I decided to write this post about the inner transformer, the power went on. It was one of those moments when you feel guided in life.

What about you?

How is your relationship with your inner transformer?

Is there any place in your life, where you would benefit from simpler goals and a smaller criteria of success, so that your inner transformer is working at just the right pace so that it doesn’t burn out?

Where can you be proud of yourself for taking small actions every day?

Oh how timely – I blew my “inner transformer” this morning when I managed to get myself double booked and VERY STRESSED. I have taken on far too much over the last 2 weeks and it fell apart this morning! I have resolved to give myself a little bit of slack in my busy timetable so I can fill up with energy again before taking on anything new! Thanks for the tips x

It’s good to know my experience could serve you! It’s so easy in today’s world to feel like we have to do more and more. It seems to help when I decide upon my criteria for a successful day, rather than let anyone outside of me decide it for me. Glad to hear you are giving yourself some breathing room!

been there! we strive to identify our life’s dream and when we do we get paralized by the immensity of it or maybe by the importance of it, I don’t know…and it makes us consider going back to our aimless life, just getting through our daily to-do list…but your strategy sounds quite logical and do-able: give your dream an hour of your day…make it a part of today (being accustomed to having it well located in the future)…wow, this is something to think about…thank you Alexandra

Alexandra, you articulated my journey so well in your comment, thank you! 🙂 You’re so right about feeling paralyzed by the bigness of this dream. I like your comment on bringing my dream into today, instead of locating it well into the future.

Great post. I am the queen of overly aggressive plans. I am proud that I am training for a triathlon and I am having trouble keeping the perfect training schedule, but I am still getting there. Thanks for another wise post.

I’ve always been impressed with anyone who trains for and participates in triathalons. It’s such a rigourous way to challenge yourself and stay in shape, but I imagine you have fun with it too. One of my other goals this summer is to increase my amount of exercise, though not quite at your level! 🙂 Hope you post about the triathalon on your blog, so I can congratulate you when you reach your goal!

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